Summary

• Tilda Swinton's collaboration with Wes Anderson is marked by her incisive and wry sensibility, making her appearances in his movies highly impactful.
• Swinton's roles in Anderson's films, though often small, showcase her ability to engage in theatrical origins and deliver restrained, stylized acting.
• Swinton's presence in any Wes Anderson movie, whether in an ensemble cast or making a cameo, is always a good sign, adding to the overall quality and enjoyment of the film.

Tilda Swinton is one of the regular actors that director Asteroid City's cast, which followed a group of individuals ― all drifting and lonely in different ways ― as they experienced an alien encounter during a space camp event in the desert. However, the character allows Swinton to continue her collaboration with the cult favorite filmmaker, as it marked her fifth time appearing in one of his movies.

Swinton usually takes very small roles in Anderson's movies, but still never fails to make an impact. An indie favorite, Wes Anderson movie is always a good sign.

5 Social Services In Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom is perhaps Wes Anderson's most Wes Anderson-esque movie, as well as a perfect summer camp film. It's set in a world like a memory of the past, purposefully magical and unreachable, with a pathos that hovers over the plot. The movie follows pre-teen pen pals Sam and Suzy running away together on an island. The adventure Sam and Suzy are chasing can't last though, and soon enough parents, police, and scout leaders are on their tail ― along with a frazzled welfare worker who is known only as Social Services, played by Swinton.

Social Services embodies the adult world and its power, which Sam and Suzy are trying to escape. Her by-the-book approach might aim to protect Sam, but it actually reflects the businesslike, detached cruelty of institutions, as she decides that the orphan might have to move to an orphanage and undergo electroshock therapy before even meeting him. Swinton has a very small role as Social Services, however. While she does a good job portraying actual concern for the children, mixed with her anger and frustration at their actions and the adults responsible for them, she is under-utilized in the movie.

4 Oracle In Isle of Dogs

Tilda Swinton makes a hilarious cameo in Isle Of Dogs, Anderson's second stop-motion animation movie. She voices a pug named Oracle who makes "prophecies" not based on being able to see the future, but just through an ability to understand the TV and human language. Other dogs are in awe of her ability to foretell the weather, for instance, but she has just watched the weather forecast. Oracle's skills end up being useful for the plot, warning the dogs of the destruction coming their way, but she is also easily distracted by the TV.

Isle Of Dogs is cozy and gently humorous fare, using old-school animation style to paint a picture of a near-future Japan in which dogs have been banished to an island of trash. The plot follows 12-year-old boy Atari (Koyu Rankin) going to the island to find his own dog, Spots (Liev Schreiber.) While Swinton's brief cameo is funny ― and the tiny, startled-looking pug Oracle is very sweet ― it really is a very small role. The actress makes much more of an impact as a larger side character in Anderson's other movies as she gets to appear on-screen rather than just voice a puppet.

3 Dr. Hickenlooper In Asteroid City

Tilda Swinton takes a slightly larger role in the enigmatic alien encounter movie Asteroid City, as one of an ensemble cast that includes other Anderson regulars such as Jason Schwartzmann and Jeffrey Wright, plus newcomers such as Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson. The alien plot, set in a desert space camp, is framed as a fictional play that is being written in yet another play. It's also a movie about isolation and grief with a much more pessimistic, even cruel tone, than Anderson's usual slightly gloomy nostalgia. Swinton's scientist, Dr. Hickenlooper, is an important part of that.

Dr. Hickenlooper helps run the desert space camp, showing its participants how to watch a rare line-up of planets by putting cardboard box-like devices on their heads. It's during this event that the alien first visits. The scientist herself has a straight line of dots, a record of the glimpse she once had of the same astronomical event in the past, actually burned onto her pupils. It's a moment in Asteroid City's ending that perfectly shows how Hickenlooper is isolated and lost like the rest of the movie's characters, but also literally marked by the things she has experienced.

2 J.K.L. Berensen In The French Dispatch

A more engaging and funnier character is Tilda Swinton's arts journalist J.K.L. Berensen in The French Dispatch, an anthology based on a fictional version of The New Yorker. The French Dispatch's cast is headlined by Dune's Timothée Chalamet as a firebrand French student. The story unfolds through structures such as magazine articles and a talk show. Swinton's vignette, "The Concrete Masterpiece," is delivered as a lecture at an art gallery. Her glamorous character Berensen tells the story of an artist, Moses Rosenthaler. While in prison, Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) strikes up a relationship with guard Simone (Léa Seydoux), and, inspired by her, paints his masterpiece on the jail wall.

Anderson pulled from real cultural figures for the film, including Swinton's character. He told the real New Yorker that Berensen was inspired by Rosamond Bernier, a Paris-based journalist who knew Frida Kahlo and delivered art lectures in New York as well as New Yorker writer S.N. Behrman. Swinton embodies what Anderson is going for even for viewers who have no inkling of the influences the pair were drawing from. She portrays her character as knowing, Bohemian, and both very New York and very Paris. Swinton makes Berensen real and her own.

1 Madame D. In The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Grand Budapest Hotel is Tilda Swinton's most memorable Wes Anderson movie role ― an impressive feat considering her very little actual screen time. Wes Anderson's wistful movie is a love letter to novelist Stefan Zweig's writing and a vision of a lost pre-World War II Europe. Ralph Fiennes steals the show as flamboyant hotel concierge Monsieur Gustave H. However, Swinton is hot on his heels as the wealthy dowager Madame D., whom Gustave has an affair with. The mysterious death of Swinton's character sets the plot's wheels in motion, as her nasty family come out of the woodwork keen to inherit her valuable painting, "Boy With Apple."

Swinton has a lot of fun as the melodramatic and clingy aristocrat, a role she embodies with gusto despite being decades younger than her character. At one point lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) is aghast at Gustave's history with Madame D., exclaiming: "She was 84 years old," to which Gustave replies, "I've had older." It's one example of Tilda Swinton's presence in the Wes Anderson movie lasting beyond her few scenes, helping to set its tone of playful adventure. Her character's death also symbolizes the loss of the world that Gustave believes in, which Zero notes had in some ways "vanished long before he ever entered it."

Source: The New Yorker